Time Blocks

It’s become so easy to track our time, I use an app on my iphone that knows how often I touch the screen and how many minutes I looked at my phone today. Manictime on my laptop tracks every click, every website and software I use. Some days it’s scary how many hours I spent online when I thought I was making stuff in the studio all day. Imagine everything else that tracks your time…. your car knows when you drove it, your credit card, the MTA pass, a security swipe at work, your front door probably knows when you walked into your apartment lobby last night.

Time is measured, and we are so close to knowing exactly how we spend every minute of it. If we are what we do, will tracking time help me understand who I am? Would we recognize the physical pattern of our time and activities? Rather than worry about being tracked, I relish the notion that soon we will collect every possible bit of data about us, I think it’s the secret to understanding who we are.

Keeping track of time, minute-by-minute is even harder than it sounds. After several amateurish attempts I googled methods to track daily time, and found Ben Lipkowitz (I've since learned ways to track my time, never fear). He had not only had been logging his time since 2005, he generously and fastidiously shared all of online at www.fennetic.net. In a recent email he told me he kept logging, but got 'lazy' (hah! hard to imagine) and hadn't updated things in a while. Rather than be totally intimidated by Ben Lipkowitz’s prodigious talent and relentless record keeping, I instantly snagged and downloaded all of his data and combed thru it for patterns. We've talk talked several times, but I know him mostly thru his data, and I have an intimate knowledge of how he spends time. Daily-Time Slices are 21 days in backwards order – newest on top, just like a web page…color coded by activity. Lipkowitz sleeps on a 26 hour cycle, his days move at a diagonal, he leans into the future - which is strangely beautiful. 2014-2015